Metropolitan research center provides a diagnosis for São Paulo in the 21st century

Brazil's largest metropolitan area has become more heterogeneous in social and spatial terms but remains strongly unequal, studies show.

By José Tadeu Arantes

Agência FAPESP – Metropolitan São Paulo had 4.8 million inhabitants in 1960. Fifty years later, it had 19.7 million. In the period 1960-2010, population growth in this vast metropolitan area, the largest in Brazil, corresponded to 1.3 times the population growth of metropolitan Paris, 1.5 times that of metropolitan Rio de Janeiro, and twice that of Greater London. Aggregate productive activities reached a scale comparable to the Chilean economy in the same period.

A group of researchers at the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM), one of the 17 Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs) supported by FAPESP, set out to decipher as much as possible about this urban ‘sphinx’. The result is the book A metrópole de São Paulo no século XXI: espaços, heterogeneidades e desigualdades (“Metropolitan São Paulo in the 21st Century: Spaces, Heterogeneities and Inequalities”).

The book has 13 chapters grouped into three sections: (i) economic dynamics, social structure and labor market; (ii) demographic dynamics and residential segregation; and (iii) the production of spaces in the metropolis.

“It’s a collective book rather than an anthology of articles. During the production process, the material collected and ongoing research were discussed in CEM’s open seminars. We investigated the changes that have taken place in São Paulo since Brazil restored democracy, a period that encompassed the 1990s and 2000s. The most recent data came from the 2010 census, released in 2012,” said the book’s editor, Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques, Full Professor at the University of São Paulo’s Political Science Department and deputy director of CEM.

“The metropolis continues to be strongly unequal, but its inequalities have changed. Access to public services has increased, although the quality of the services provided varies according to the user’s social class. Above all, the outlying or peripheral neighborhoods, which used to be inhabited almost exclusively by poor people, have become more heterogeneous spaces in social terms,” Marques told Agência FAPESP.

The book stresses that São Paulo has become a more heterogeneous city in productive, social and spatial terms. It is also less unequal in terms of income, labor market insertion and living conditions, but inequality remains significant.

“Certain precarious areas have improved little. Urban mobility patterns tend to be stable and are characterized by striking social inequality. From the standpoint of its spaces, the metropolis remains strongly segregated in terms of race and class, in a clearly hierarchical structure,” Marques writes in the book.

The portrait resulting from the research is far more complete and complex than the notion of a city polarized between a center and periphery that is characteristic of the sociological diagnoses of the 1970s. The notion may have been accurate then but no longer offers an adequate understanding of the processes under way. In the new configuration, increasingly exclusive, often closed-off areas for the elite coexist with the popularization of the historic center and with socially mixed intermediate and peripheral areas.

Another revisionist conclusion reached by the study is that economic growth in the service sector, especially in productive services and commerce, has not led to the deindustrialization predicted in much of the international literature of the 1990s.

“The metropolis appears to have undergone a superimposition of economic functions, concentrating command capabilities without completely losing its industrial production,” the authors say.

The levels of schooling rose in all classes during the two decades studied, as a result of improved access to education. The rising number of women entering the labor market, especially in relatively well-paid occupations that require higher levels of education, was another major transformation.

In the chapter on slums, the researchers show that favelas have not expanded as intensely as expected. On the contrary, the population of slum dwellers has grown proportionally less than the total population of the metropolitan area. As a predominant trend, social conditions and infrastructure have improved in São Paulo’s slums, especially in the past decade.

However, the decrease in inequality is not reflected in attitudes to race. “While the presence of self-declared non-whites has increased in all classes, their relative presence in the upper classes hasn’t changed, suggesting that racial inequality remains almost intact. Lower income groups display less racial segregation than higher income groups,” Marques said.

“Employment and poverty have trended in opposite directions. In the 1990s, unemployment, [job] informality and poverty rose again after a short sharp improvement in 1994 due to economic stabilization. In the 2000s, the movement reversed, with unemployment and poverty falling and job formalization increasing.

“The net result of these two decades was a reduction in poverty and income inequality, as well as lower unemployment and a growing number of formal jobs.”

Urban mobility

A particularly undesirable legacy of the twentieth century that has been inherited by twenty-first century São Paulo is complicated urban mobility. CEM’s research shows that a third of the journeys that are made by its inhabitants are on foot and that travel by road is vastly more frequent than by rail.

Buses are the most widely used form of public transportation, accounting for a quarter of daily journeys and for far longer travel times.

This public transportation structure, which has changed little in the past two decades, coexists with mushrooming individual transportation, so that cars and buses carry roughly the same number of people.